I have a little project called Localographer, which you can use to create heat maps and find a house or apartment near your workplace, friends and relatives, or other place you’d like to be. When I showed it to my brother he tried mapping out places in Boston and ran into a limitation – the interface doesn’t show you various transit options and it doesn’t make it easy to figure out the real cost and benefits of living in different places.

If you move to the suburbs, you might be able to commute by car but living by a train stop can be cheaper and easier. In some neighborhoods you can get 10 different kinds of food in a 10 minute walk, in others you need to get in your car and drive a quarter mile to get anything to eat at all.

Adding features like this to Localographer means solving two problems – data and user interface. I don’t have access to restaurant locations, transit stops, etc. and that sort of data can be expensive to get from commercial sources. I could go the wiki route but that would require building an interface for users to contribute data and finding ways to make the data more reliable.

So in the mean time, if you want to get an idea of how walkable a potential neighborhood might be, take a look at Walk Score. It’s a very cool site which has some of the features I’ve been meaning to add to Localographer – you can get a score for how livable the area around any address might be.

For example, my current neighborhood in California has a score of 74 out of 100. Our house in Shaker Heights scores 62 out of 100. Because any excuse is a good excuse to use a spreadsheet and a graph, I’ve plotted out the walkability of all the places I’ve lived using a Google Docs spreadsheet and the Interactive Time Series Gadget. I wrote earlier about how you can embed any Google Doc or Spreadsheet into a blog post but Gadgets are even easier – just click the “Publish” button on the gadget and paste the Javascript code in the raw HTML view of your blogging software.

There are some issues with Walk Score, of course – for example Naples, Florida scores very high, but when I lived there I really missed having access to a car. Most of the restaurants and shops along 5th Street and Tamiami Trail were out of my internship-funded price range. I used to bike some distance to get to The Clock, a cheap diner.

All of this discussion is pointing toward a much larger question that I have been thinking about for a long time – I know how to study the usability of web sites and other software, but I wonder if anyone does usability studies of urban planning? I’ve seen traffic flow studies and I know building codes have some basis in ergonomics and accessibility, but does anyone do observational studies of how people interact with different urban environments to figure out what works and what doesn’t? Is there a Fitt’s Law of where to locate grocery stores compared to condos?

Earlier I wrote about using Photoshop to create a heat map and to use data maps when house hunting. I got a pretty good response to those tutorials but the process is a little too labor intensive for most. So when I moved to California, I decided to do something similar, using the Google Maps API, so that it would be easy for anyone to make their own heat map.So here it is: Localographer – build interactive heat maps for house and apartment hunting. You can see a screenshot below:Localographer is a beta release right now, so watch out for bugs and random downtime. Also, I have to add a disclaimer: this is not an official Google project, this is something I did on my spare time. In fact, most of the work was done before I started working at Google in preparation for our move to California.The site takes you though a series of steps to build your map:

Pick your city and create your map;

Add places you’d like to be near (like your job or your school);

Add potential locations (houses, apartments, condos) to see how they compare.

I’ve got a ton of ideas for additional functionality, so hopefully I’ll have time to add more in the next few weeks. I’ll also be working on the site’s design, making it a bit more usable and interactive.Here’s how a map in Localographer compares to my Photoshop heat map of the Cleveland area (click on the images to see larger versions):In case you’re interested, the site was developed in PHP with a MySQL database. The maps use the Google Maps API with some hand-written functions to correctly draw the hot spots.Please take a look and let me know what you think. Post and problems, bugs, or new feature ideas in the comments below. Later I’ll post a poll so you can vote on new features and other enhancements.